Does anyone find it as inconsistent and hypocritical as I do that Obama’s big victory party in Grant Park in Chicago – the scene of violent leftwing protests in 1968, no doubt supported by Bill Ayres – will require the 65,000 attendees to present a ticket and government photo ID before admittance?  While on the other hand Obama denounces any measures to present a photo ID before voting to reduce election fraud as discriminatory?  Isn’t Obama’s election night ID requirement discriminatory?

Just wondering…

Perhaps Obama is concerned some folks might try to get in to the event who didn’t contribute to his campaign.

Americans are expected to do plenty of things on the honor system, pay income taxes and vote, for instance.  Sadly, as income taxes have increased along with the power of our government to hand out benefits, the incentive to cheat on both taxes and elections has increased too. 

It is instructive to note that during the debate over the income tax 95 years ago, New York Congressman Sereno Payne-R, the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, quoted William Gladstone when he said the income tax would turn America into, “a nation of liars” – and that was with the then top rate of seven-percent!

Now with the federal budget at $3.1 trillion and along with that, unprecedented power to, “spread the wealth around,” as Senator Barack Obama so revealingly said last week, we have far more at stake in our elections than we did in 1913 when the federal budget was $344 million ($3.1 trillion is almost 10,000 times larger than $344 million).  $3.1 trillion can fund a lot of Marxist wealth redistribution schemes or Wall Street bailouts. 

So, is it any wonder that we have the radical community organizing labor group ACORN manufacturing hundreds of thousands of new “registered voters”?  Obama got his start as a Chicago “community organizer” by working with ACORN to register voters in 1992, then served as their lawyer in 1995. As a member of the board of Chicago’s Woods Fund, Obama helped to funnel more than $200,000 to ACORN.  This year, Obama’s campaign shelled out $832,000 to an ACORN subsidiary, calling the money a payment for “staging, sound, lighting” in federal campaign reports but later admitting the funds were for getting out the vote. 

The Los Angeles Times ran an illuminating piece on Oct. 20 about the ongoing criminal saga of Tyrone Freeman, president of the Service Employees International Union’s largest California local.  According to a criminal investigation by the U.S. Labor Department, the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office, Mr. Freeman’s non-profit charity forced workers to help several Democratic campaigns.  If true, this is a violation of the group’s non-profit status.  Whether any of the elections Mr. Freeman allegedly assisted with illegal help were close enough to be affected is unknown at this time. 

Meanwhile, the phenomenon of hundreds of millions of dollars of Internet credit card donations for Barack Obama opens up another election law fraud front.  Federal rules only require disclosure when a donation reaches $200.  The ease by which wealthy individuals, or even foreign nationals or governments, can bypass our 34-year-old disclosure rules is stunning.  Some tentative mainstream media investigations have already uncovered massive campaign finance fraud in Obama’s $300 million of online fundraising (see: “With tiny sums, fictitious donors pay campaigns online” in the Oct. 11 edition of the International Herald Tribune).  Computer technology makes it laughingly easy for cheating on a massive scale as it is quite simple to write a program to make a series of small online credit card donations so as to hide the true source of the money.  This, of course, was impractical back in the 1970s when the campaign donation disclosure law was written, since such donations would have had to have been individually mailed to a campaign as small checks. 

Now, with the race for president tightening up again, we have to hope, as pundit Dick Morris so eloquently put it last week, “that the election becomes close enough for the Democrats not to steal.”

The two presidential candidates commented Monday about the kind of Supreme Court justice they might nominate during their term in office.

Sen. McCain said he’d nominate someone who would follow a, “…strict interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.” That is to be expected in a democratic republic such as the U.S., where both rule of law and separation of powers (the checking of one branch of the government by the other two so one branch does not become all-powerful) are important in keeping the Constitution intact and our liberties secure.

Sen. Obama, on the other hand, said he’d seek justices possessing “compassion” and “empathy.”  Compassion and empathy?  Sounds like Obama intends to nominate his good friend Oprah to the highest court in the land.  This is the most disturbing utterance to date to escape the voluble lips  of Obama.

Compassion and empathy are fine human traits, but they should not be the foremost attributes for a Supreme Court justice who must impartially interpret the Constitution to maintain rule of law.

If compassion and empathy are to reign supreme over rule of law, then our courts must ignore the law so as to dispense their own vision of moral compassion and warm empathy.  Of course, this path has already been well worn in many Asian societies where Confucianism places the highest primacy on social order and harmony at the expense of consistently applied law.  Such an emphasis, lacking a foundation in the bedrock of law with its Constitutional protections of individual liberty, soon leads to tyranny, judicial or otherwise.

Judges guided by compassion and empathy will soon find themselves creating “rights” for some that others will be forced to fund out of their own pockets – all without the benefit of a bill being passed by the people’s representatives, then signed into law by the president.